I nod to greet her when she notices us in the doorway. She takes a few steps toward us and we shake hands.

    “Come on in. Sorry,” she says about making us wait, but there’s no need since we apprenticed together. “Trying to make sure I don’t miss any detail. Hi, Zosi, haven’t seen you since you solved the city. Have you learned much from the philosopher?”

    “It’s really the other way around,” I point out, and the medium smiles because she knows Zosi's a saint.

    “I talked to the family. The father’s gotten worse and the siblings refused to tell me more than how afraid they are of being near him. They’re hiding around the house. It’s been some time since I’ve seen this.”

    “Since the Enlightenment ages?” Hermes doesn't really ask, even if it's sounds like a question. It's really more of a statement. 

  The medium shakes her head. “Give or take.”

  Stepping through the doorway, I feel the tug. It deepens the breath gathered in my chest. My stomach squeezes together like fight-ready punch. I wonder about its reach. 

  The boy’s arms float at this side, limp and heavy. He’s caught in rapture.

    “Is he going to take them away?” The mother’s voice rises like a thin sad tune. Covering up boiling anger. Her chin trembles. I turn my head to where she sits on the floor, knees bunched up, and I meet her wet eyes.

  Hermes averts his gaze.

    “No,” I say. “He isn’t taking anyone today.”

  The sick sinking in my legs floods me as we bridge the distance between us and the bed.

    “How do we even reach him?” Zosi asks, looking up.

    “I tried it earlier,” the medium starts. “If you get close enough, it draws you in.”

  As she finishes her short explanation, her feet lift off the wooden floorboards and she ascends to the height of the bed, weightless and perfectly calm. Her sleeves flutter soundlessly.

  We take to examining the boy and the medium relates again for me what the mother told her earlier. I realize I can’t hear much beyond her voice. The noises of the house and of the city beyond the garden are muted. The boy’s utterly trapped and sealed inside his own mind.

  He hasn’t eaten in days and days but apparently he doesn’t eat much, anyhow. He doesn’t drink water. The mother has to hold him up and pour it between his lips. It goes the wrong way sometimes and it gushes back through his nose.

  He used to make chalk drawings on the front road and run around with the neighbourhood kids. He liked school and he stayed away from the singularity. He took such care of his younger siblings and liked reading books. But day after day, he read more. Sometimes, she’d catch him with a blank stare on his face, eyes lost on the empty surface of walls. 

  And around the time the rain started, he was scribbling down nonsensical lines and drawing too many comparisons. He was suddenly very taken with colours and textures and detailed, detailed description of just about anything. But especially the frozen sunset. Vivid portrayals of planetary orbits, supernovas and the beginning. He woke up screaming at night about the rupture.

  He doesn’t even reach her hip and he’s talking about death. This and that and death. He was quoting from memory and sitting in the window like a cat. And when he talked to his friends, it was only about the spooks.

  Ah, and the spooks visited him at night. Woke up gripping sheets and skin and air. Realizations like thundering drums. Woke up to the void. 

  Here’s the thing about spooks. Most of the time, they can be kept at bay. Most of the time, they get tired of haunting you. But if they take a liking to you, it’s harder to send them off.

  You might be familiar with some of the signs yourself: the irking feeling of being watched, the creaky steps in the neighbouring room when you’re all alone, the snap inside the walls you tend to attribute to an old house, the shadow slipping away from the corner of your eye right when you turn to face it, waking up suddenly, almost startled, only to shift onto your other side.

  It’s hard for philosophers, too. In my case, I befriended mine, though our relationships has the expected and inevitable ups and downs. In Zosi’s case, he was eaten by his.

    “And his condition worsened when the rain started?” I ask.

    “Yes. It hasn’t stopped at all and it only rains over this house.”

  Something interiorized, triggered. It eats away slowly until it evolves enough to start having a pull on the surroundings. I wonder if Sunny made anything bend before she collapsed.

    “Let’s see, let’s see.” The medium’s patience is gentleness. Delicate scaly fingers examine the boy’s throat and eyes. She pulls away. “Hand me that device of yours. The one like an ophthalmoscope.”

    “It is an ophthalmoscope,” I tell her and she smiles. I grab onto my motionless but floating case and hand it to her. She holds his eyelids open and shines the light through his pupil. “What do you see?”

    “A starry sky."

  Looks through nose and ears. Settles her pointy elven ear against his chest. The medium’s skin has a gleam to it.

    “What does it sound like?” I ask.

    “Nothing, really.”

  I press my ear to his chest.

    “And he hasn’t moved?”

    “No, not since last week.”

    “Go on, what happened?”

  He went to bed and the mother found him immobile in the morning. She tried playing him music and reading him stories and even brought some of his spirit friends over. She tried the light sparrows and purple blossoms.

    “They work for the occasional hiccup. But they don’t work for his father, either.”

  Light sparrows, the most common and accessible thing when you don’t have an angel on speed dial. When you need a pick-me-up. A quick blessing or comfort. Like most ghost birds, they’re probability waves so they spawn throughout the city. They’re overly friendly and tend to visit insistently even when you don’t have use for them. They enjoy feeling needed and don’t have a conception of personal space.

  I take a hold of his right arm and lift it. His muscles aren’t stiff and his joints don’t creak. He’s warm to the touch. I see a flicker of movement under his lids.

    “Knock on his chest,” I tell the medium, and she does.

  A student walks into the room through the wall. “He sounds like a wooden-door," he points out dutifully. "Now we count, one, two three.”